Microsoft has struck nonexclusive deals with Twitter and Facebook to bring the sites’ popular real-time data feeds to Bing.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft’s online division, announced the news Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Bing.com/twitter went live shortly after Microsoft’s announcement and demonstration.

The deals with Twitter and Facebook mark a significant victory for Microsoft over Google, whose market-dominating search engine ostensibly won’t include real-time data, at least from the two most popular services, anytime soon. All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher reported two weeks ago that Twitter was in talks with Microsoft and Google; apparently, Microsoft finished up first.

“This is a big deal that we’ve been working on for a long time,” said Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, who demoed bing.com/twitter at the Web 2.0 Summit. He said Bing has had access to Twitter data since summer and used it for BingTweets.

Real-time data from Twitter and Facebook could enhance a search engine by identifying current hot topics, improving search results and delivering more targeted advertising.

“Were you as fascinated by the 6-year-old boy floating away in a balloon as we were? Was it a hoax?,” Paul Yiu, of the Bing Social Search Team, wrote in a blog post. “We know that people are going to twitter more and more for information surrounding all the latest chatter.

Bing.com/twitter shows recent tweets about any topic, such as Wednesday’s Bing announcement. Click to enlarge

“You can now search for what people are saying all over the web about breaking news topics, your favorite celebrity, hometown sports team, and anything else you use Twitter to stay on top of today.”

Twitter is quickly becoming the place to go to check on local breaking events, such as a power outage or an earthquake, Sullivan said. People can go to Twitter or Facebook to see whether what they felt was actually an earthquake or, say, just a truck driving by.

In one sense, he said, Twitter is a source of “hyper news.”

“Of course it can be used for evil  Jeff Goldblum isn’t really dead,” Sullivan said. “But most of the time it’s reliable.”

So what’s the point of integrating Twitter and Facebook with Bing when people can just visit Twitter and Facebook themselves?

Bing potentially can do a much better job at searching Tweets and Facebook status updates than those sites can, Sullivan said. Twitter’s internal search, for instance, is slow and often goes down. Plus, the results are difficult to navigate.

“It’s not, ironically, a Google-killer in and of itself,” Sullivan said of the Bing deal. “It’s just another search service, just like travel, just like shopping.”

Much of what is posted on Twitter is public by design, while Facebook’s users prefer the closed nature of the service to disperse a wide variety of personal information only to their friends and they want to control it.

Thus, sources said, not all Facebook updates will be included in the real-time feed to be searched by Bing, but only those its users choose to make available to the wider public. Facebook will apparently provide users with a numbers of new tools to do so.

The Facebook-integrated service will be available “at a later date,” Microsoft said in an announcement.

Bing.com/twitter allows people to rank results by “most recent” or “best match,” Microsoft said. The search engine considers a Twitter user’s popularity, how interesting a tweet is, and “other indicators of quality and trustworthiness,” the company said.

The site also automatically expands shortened URLs, such as those created by bit.ly.

“We’re super-happy with the partnership with Twitter as the first major search engine to do real-time,” Lu said at the summit. Right now, the feature is only available in the United States.

The announcement produced immediate hype on, fittingly, Twitter. At noon, “Bing” was one of the trending topics on Twitter as news of the deal leaked out.

“It’ll give people a second look at Bing if they haven’t been there recently,” Sullivan said. “I think it’s a good thing for Microsoft, definitely. For Google, I think they’ll end up doing a deal as well. It’s not exclusive.”